I run Slackware 9.1 at home. I'm at school and need to write a program for the administrative staff. I'd like to write it in Linux, so I put ZipSlack on a 128MB USB drive and have tried multiple floppy boot-images to work with it. They all result in a kernel panic, even if I specify to use /dev/sda1 (which is the device that the USB drive mounts at, as I managed to see in one of the floppies (a Knoppix-based floppy)).

I need a floppy boot-image that can mount a USB drive as the root filesystem.

Also, RUNT was not the answer here.